Personal site of Neil Stevens

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

That’s what the Constitution says on patents (and copyrights, but we’re not going there tonight). However today the situation involving patents is messy, and takes some effort to sort through. I’ll do my best here to give the rundown of the challenges we face today, and what we should do about them.

I know, I’m late again. Turns out after being sick my body’s just been exhausted recovering. We’ll be better off next week.

Ajit Pai came to RedState on Friday to tell us about the Zapple Doctrine was being used by the FCC to stifle freedom of speech, specifically to try to hinder Scott Walker. The Zapple Doctrine is now dead, but we need to check the FCC to keep it from returning.

The longer you look at regulatory policy in this country, the more you run into special interests looking out for their own personal payoffs. But seriously, I feel like terrestrial broadcasters are the worst of all when it comes to acting entitled. Waah waah we’re big fat socialists and we don’t want to have to pay the people who made the stuff we’re broadcasting. Meanwhile, Waah waah we want to restrict competition amongst ourselves to retransmit our broadcasts on cable.

Virtually every company, every industry I write about in this space goes around lobbying in DC for some advantage. But nobody gets so many special protections and is so rabid in protecting them at any cost, as terrestrial broadcasters. At some point, small government folks are going to have to smash this racket.

If you want an explanation of the ‘Heartbleed’ bug in the news, Francis Cianfrocca gives a good explanation in Coffee and Markets. But more important is his point about NSA. He always speaks carefully about that organization, but in his roundabout way he made an excellent point: NSA has a dual mandate. NSA’s job is both to break into enemy communications, and to protect our communications. The Heartbleed bug is so devastating that if they knew about it, they’d have to work to protect us from it, before someone else could use it against us. That’s how bad it is. There’s no way they knew about it a year.

Mike Lee, we’re your friends here at RedState. We backed you in the primary, and we’re sure to back you going forward. But please, lay off on his Comcast/Time Warner deal. The arguments you’re making, at least as portrayed by The Hill, are the same arguments that were used falsely to fool conservatives into backing the Net Neutrality power grab. Now they’re being used to trick us into backing an antitrust power grab.

First off, even if Net Neutrality wasn’t fixing an imaginary threat, the kind of discrimination you’re talking about is already banned by consent decree from the Comcast – NBC Universal deal. So your fears are doubly unfounded. But don’t take my word for it. Let the market work. Markets are how all of us speak, and we know better than government.